Technical Field
The present invention relates to an approach to combining data streams from installed audio-visual sensors with ad-hoc personal mobile device audio-visual sensors, and more particularly to improving the quality of the existing audio-visual streams being captured by using audio and video sensors available on the mobile devices, which meeting participants are likely to carry.
Description of the Related Art
Meetings can play a very important role in present day business processes. One of the objects of the meeting can be to collect and process audio-visual recordings of meeting proceedings for archival, reference, and/or distribution to people not present at the meeting. These proceedings are usually collected via recordings from table-top microphones and video cameras placed at fixed positions in the room. Performance of these systems and applications may be directly correlated with the quality of the signals being captured.
Meetings may also be commonly attended via telephone/VOIP calls and other video conferencing software like Skype™, WebEx™, Vsee, Polycomm™ or other publically available conferencing systems. The participants may be at remote geographical locations connected to the meeting site over a network, for example, the Internet.
In a fixed arrangement of audio-visual (AV) equipment, the system may recognize the positioning of the sensors but is unaware of the positioning of persons present in a meeting, and may not be able to identify those who are speaking. The audio sensors can capture entire room acoustics and the video sensors can capture broad visual fields, however, such fixed position sensors can have difficulties focusing on individual speakers. Fixed audio sensors picking up an entire room's acoustics may introduce noise such as reverberation and background noise in the audio channel. Similarly, the quality of images captured by fixed visual sensors may be affected by the lighting and positioning of the subjects, which can introduce distortions in the visual channel.
Adding an ad-hoc arrangement of audio sensors can create further difficulties because the system is unaware of the spatial arrangement of the mobile audio sensors, as well as the positioning of the speakers.